Small Places is a newsletter and podcast which talks about parenting, education, and children’s rights.
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Every week until It’s Not Fair is published on 20th June, I’ll be sharing a short excerpt from a chapter along with some discussion of why I wanted to include that particular topic, anything I struggled with while writing it, and which bits I wanted to include but ended up cutting due to word count!
In today’s post I’ll be sharing a slightly longer excerpt from the introduction, which I hope will give you a flavour of why I wanted to write this book.
Just a reminder before I begin that It’s Not Fair is available to preorder now. Preorders are SO important (you can read why here) and make such a big difference to how well a book does, so please order your copy soon if you can - and then spread the word! As a thank you to everyone who preorders, I’ll be creating some special perks to send out nearer the time (so hold on to your receipt or order confirmation!)
It’s Not Fair: An exclusive extract from the introduction
As a parent-educator — and as a parent myself — I have read a lot of books and materials on raising and educating children. But the more I read, the more I noticed that virtually no books outside of academia were talking explicitly about power, which seemed strange given that the parent–child dynamic can feel so unequal. Even ‘gentle’ parenting books, which encourage readers to move away from outdated parenting practices like punishments and making babies ‘cry- it-out’, stopped short at analysing power relationships or calling out adultism, instead assuming that it is normal for adults to hold more power and set the rules. These books seemed to rely on and support a vision of parenting as something private, happening between an individual adult and child, without significance for society at large.
Much of what I read seemed focused on the idea of raising children who would grow up to be good people — polite, kind, helpful, invested in justice — with many references made to the impact parenting and education practices can have on children’s future development and outcomes. At a time when more children than ever are struggling with their mental health, when families are living in poverty and struggling to put food on the table, when young people are growing up with the threat of the climate crisis looming over their shoulder, it seemed strange to ignore these things — and unfair to heap all of the responsibility for ‘fixing’ children’s problems onto individual parents. Few of the books I read had anything to say about children as capable, brilliant, complete people (with some notable exceptions: see the recommended reading list at the back), much less about children’s capacity to make meaningful decisions about their lives. I began incorporating more reflections on adult–child power relations in my work, prompting my clients to think about where they might be able to make changes in their own lives, but I was frustrated that I didn’t have many resources to recommend if they wanted to find out more.
Still more surprising to me was the complete absence of any mention of children’s rights. When I first started reading about the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, years after becoming a parent, I was baffled: why was I only just reading about this now? Why weren’t the parenting books I was reading shouting about children’s rights from the rooftops — or at least mentioning them? I soon realised I wanted to go deeper, and signed up to do an MA in the Sociology of Childhood and Children’s Rights at UCL’s Institute of Education. It’s no exaggeration to say that my mind was blown. It turned out there were decades of research and academic writing exploring children’s rights, adultism, and ideas surrounding children’s liberation. I discovered a whole new world, where suddenly the ideas I’d been boring my friends with for years fitted into a framework of rich scholarship.
But while it was exciting to engage with a wealth of radical, exciting, even revolutionary ideas, it was also disheartening to realise that so few of them were making it through to parents, teachers, journalists, or policy makers. Academics exploring these issues don’t always feel the need to consider how they might translate into a shift in policy or practice. Ideas are important, but we need action too if we want things to change. And most parents, teachers, and policy makers — those people whose actions can most easily impact children’s daily lives — don’t have the time, energy, or desire to wade through stacks of technical writing.
This book is an attempt to bridge the gap between theory and practice. In it I want to help you understand adultism and the effect it has on children’s lives as well as offering some practical suggestions for how we can move towards children’s liberation. It is the book I wish I had had when my daughter was tiny, and I was starting to rethink everything I thought I knew about parenting. Writing and researching it has been life-changing for me. I hope it will be similarly impactful for you as a reader.
It’s Not Fair: why it’s time for a grown-up conversation about how adults treat children is out on June 20th.
It’s Not Fair: table of contents
I don’t know about you, but when before I buy nonfiction books I love to get a sense of what’s inside, so I thought it would be fun to share the contents page so you can have a sneak preview.
If you hate spoilers of any kind (like my husband who won’t even read a book’s blurb - I know!) look away now…
There were definitely some chapters I found easier to write than others, and the book ended up being too long to include a chapter on children’s digital rights which in an ideal world I’d have liked to include (as it was, I already ended up needing to cut more than 10k as at one point the manuscript was over 100,000 words - which, frankly, is excessive for any nonfiction book!).
I think that the ten chapters work really well together, building a cohesive argument which flows from one to the next. They can all be read alone like essays, but I think you get more from them if you read them together. The first three-four chapters in particular are really important for understanding the rest of the book.
Next Monday I’ll be sharing an excerpt from chapter one, so make sure you’re subscribed to get it straight to your inbox!
Eloise x
Do you have pre-order links for the US? A quick search on Bookshop and Amazon in the US isn't turning up any options.
Really looking forward to reading the rest of the book! Totally agree that there is some amazing academic discussion around children and childhood but not enough connection to practice, so excited that you’re bridging the gap in this area.